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IN COLLECTIONS
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"2018.06.18 duet with Tom DiVenti — Eastern Pennsylvania — via FaceTime": Starting on January 1st, 2018, I began making a movie every day of me playing (M)Usic. The plan was to shoot one every day of 2018 & to string together excerpts from each of them in chronological order to make a feature-length movie to be called "365". Along the way I decided to compile monthly reports named by month & year, e.g.: "January, 2018", & to release these online a month after they were done. Hence, "January, 2018" was uploaded on March 1, 2018. I started thinking about each month more & more thematically. "May, 2018" became my piano month. "June, 2018" is my duets month. It was difficult to find 30 local people willing to play a duet with me to meet my goal of a different duet for every day in June so I contacted people in my international contacts to somehow make a duet together — using Skype or some other means. We've been playing the duets for as long as they take, spontaneously deciding when they were over, & then I've been excerpting roughly :20 to a minute to use in "June, 2018" & "365". At 1st, each movie that I made documenting each duet was thought of as little more than raw footage but, gradually, they started seeming like significant works in & of themselves. SO, after I'd edited the footage I shot with Michael Pestal via FaceTime, I decided to declare each movie to stand on its own & to break my pattern of waiting a month to post the monthly footage to post one of these daily duets every other day starting on June 16th, until mid-August when all of them would be uploaded. This 18th one features my oldest friend of all the duet participants: Tom DiVenti. We met in Baltimore no later than 1977. Tom was the only person I remember coming to the Maryland Writer's Council print shop to see my 1st book in-progress. He was actually CURIOUS about my writing. He was a performance poet who went on to found one of Baltimore's 1st punk bands, Da Moronics, as well as the Apathy venue & the Apathy Press. He published the 1st edition of my 3rd book, "How to Write a Resumé: Volume II: Making a Good First Impression". We'd mostly lost touch with each other until he reconnected with me about participating in an exhibit at a museum of ill-repute . That museum seems to've since shied away from the-people-who're-still-a-threat-to-the-status-quo so it's looking like the exhibit's been cancelled. Nonetheless, it served its purpose by reconnected Tom & me & I made a very-on-the-fly movie about him called, simply enough, "DiVenti" & available on my onesownthoughts YouTube channel here: https://youtu.be/UydvbT-1geQ . For this duet, Tom decided to use a few personal favorite sound bytes from movies. Tom ordinarily plays guitar & sings so this was a 1st for him. I decided to play percussion & Micro-Korg (borrowed from my local library's music department). The samples will be easily recognized as from scenes of sociopathic or psychopathic impending violence or outright violence. On a different note, I often explain to people that I'm not a musician, that I'm a Usician, a Low Classicist, a booed usician, a Sound Thinker, etc. People often seem to agree that I'm not a musician because they hate the way I play so much & hate the way I break all sorts of unwritten laws about what makes 'good music'. In other words, they don't understand that I'm trying to make a point that I'm thinking about context & creatively exploring it. - tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE note written on July 18, 2018E.V.
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Uploaded by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE on